I write
the following counter-list: 10 reasons why a Palestinian State (right now) is a
bad idea for everyone.

Please
note: I do think a Palestinian state is by far the most desirable outcome for
everyone (except the jihadis), if we’re talking about a state that behaves the
way European Union nations behave: they disagree, but understand they’re on the
same side. If however, as is every person with power in Palestinian culture
right now, they are bent on our destruction, then trying to make a state with
them will weaken us and strengthen them (good for no one but the jihadis). I am
a member of Peace When, not Peace Now.

1. There
is no serious evidence that the Palestinian leadership both “secular” (Fatah)
and religious (Hamas) want a state of their own that will live in peace with an
Israeli state. There is, on the contrary, ample evidence that they will treat
anything they get as a staging ground for further attacks.

2. The
Palestinians have, for all their opportunities, never been able to set up the
infrastructure of a responsible state. The miserable career of Fayyad
illustrates how far from a transparent governance, a fair juridical system, a
competent administration they are. Why create a sure failure?

3. This
likelihood is all the greater if they get their concessions by means that
involve going around the backs of the Israelis and having things forced on the
Israelis. In honor-shame cultures, any time a foe is forced to make concessions
it’s a sign of weakness, and an occasion to make further (violent) claims.

4. As
the withdrawal from Gaza showed, Hamas will eat Fatah within months of any
power vacuum. Thus it is a near certainty that a Palestinian state will become
a militant Jihadi state. Indeed, Daesh (ISIS) would probably eat Hamas as quickly
as Hamas eats Fatah.

5. With
51 Muslim majority states in the world, 22 Arab states, all of them either
failures or worse, none of them solid democracies, most of them consistently
belligerent to neighbors whether Arab or Muslim or not, why on earth would the
world community want yet another guaranteed failed, bellicose, fascist, Jihadi
state? Giving the current Palestinian leadership a state is like giving a
crack-addicted teenager the keys to a fully-armed tank.

6. There
are people with a much greater claim on the world community’s values to have a
state, peoples with their own language, in some cases their own religion, their
own (real) history: Kurds, Berbers, Tibetans, Tamils, Chechens, etc. To give a
state to a group with the same language, religion, and (until a generation ago)
the same identity, as 22 other Arab ones sets a terrible precedent.

7. The
West faces an implacable enemy in global Jihad. It would be nothing short of
reckless to create another major opening for Jihadi forces to take root and use
state privileges to expand operations (e.g. diplomatic immunity).

8. Israel
represents the only civilizational ally the West has in the Middle East (pace
Obama’s delusions about Turkey and his BFF Erdogan). To undermine her in a
battle for her existence by empowering a genocidal movement with state power
would be little short of insanely self-destructive. Without Israel, no Jordan,
no Lebanon (however dysfunctional). No intelligence, no counter-weight to
Jihadi impetus.

9. To
give in to the tyranny of a democracy of tyrannies in the UN is to undermine
the very principles of international democracy.

10. At
this time, with an incompetent if not malevolent Palestinian leadership, with
global Jihad the “strong horse,” and a Western world falling ill to the disease
of anti-semitism and the outbreak of an aggressive Muslim “street,” it would be
suicidal to press so foolish a policy.

In the
current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking,
supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged
weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they
provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as
“unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.

The
Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in
response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department
spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called
on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.”

In
short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to
the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of
distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against
whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration — which can
apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by
them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of
calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away
suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they
shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.

Two
reasons stand out.

One,
Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. Phony red lines, faux deadlines,
reset with Putin, surrendering all the original bargaining chips in the Iranian
deal, snubbing Israel, cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing the
threat of ISIS, allowing Iraq to collapse by abruptly pulling out all American
troops, giving way to serial indecision in Afghanistan, ostracizing the
moderate Sunni regimes, wrecking Libya, and setting the stage for Benghazi —
all of these were the result of administration choices, not fated events. One
of the results of this collapse of American power and presence in the Middle
East is an emboldened Palestinian movement that has recently renounced the Oslo
Accords and encouraged the offensive of edged weapons.

Mahmoud
Abbas, the subsidized president of the self-proclaimed Palestinian State, and
his subordinates have sanctioned the violence. Any time Palestinians sense
distance between the U.S. and Israel, they seek to widen the breach. When the
Obama team deliberately and often gratuitously signals its displeasure with
Israel, then the Palestinians seek to harden that abstract pique into concrete
estrangement.

Amid
such a collapse of American power, Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed
the Obama pronouncements — from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo
speech to his current contextualizations and not-so private slapdowns of
Netanyahu — and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public
statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few
consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.”

The
more chaos there is, the more CNN videos of Palestinian terrorists being killed
by Israeli civilians or security forces, the more NBC clips of knife-wielding
terrorists who are described as unarmed, and the more MSNBC faux maps of
Israeli absorption of Palestine, so all the more the Abbas regime and Hamas
expect the “international community” to force further Israeli concessions. The
Palestinians hope that they are entering yet another stage in their endless war
against Israel. But this time, given the American recessional, they have new
hopes that the emerging Iran–Russia–Syria–Iraq–Hezbollah axis could offer ample
power in support of the violence and could help to turn the current
asymmetrical war more advantageously conventional. The Palestinians believe,
whether accurately or not, that their renewed violence might be a more brutal
method of aiding the administration’s own efforts to pressure the Israelis to
become more socially just, without which there supposedly cannot be peace in
the Middle East.

But
there is a second, more general explanation for the moral equivalence and
anemic response from the White House. The Obama “we are the ones we’ve been
waiting for” administration is the first postmodern government in American
history, and it has adopted almost all the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions
about human nature.

Affluent
and leisured Western culture in the 21st century assumes that it has reached a
stage of psychological nirvana, in which the Westernized world is no longer
threatened in any existential fashion as it often was in the past. That allows
Westerners to believe that they no longer have limbic brains, and so are no
longer bound by Neanderthal ideas like deterrence, balance of power, military
alliances, and the use of force to settle disagreements. Their wealth and
technology assure them that they are free, then, to enter a brave new world of
zero culpability, zero competition, and zero hostility that will ensure
perpetual tranquility and thus perpetual enjoyment of our present material
bounty.

Our
children today play tee-ball, where there are no winners and losers — and thus
they are schooled that competition is not just detrimental but also can, by
such training, be eliminated entirely. Our adolescents are treated according to
the philosophy of “zero tolerance,” in which the hero who stops the punk from
bullying a weaker victim is likewise suspended from school. Under the pretense
of such smug moral superiority, our schools have abdicated the hard and ancient
task of distinguishing bad behavior from good and then proceeding with the
necessary rewards and punishments. Our universities have junked military
history, which schooled generations on how wars start, proceed, and end. Instead,
“conflict resolution and peace studies” programs proliferate, in which empathy
and dialogue are supposed to contextualize the aggressor and thus persuade him
to desist and seek help — as if aggression, greed, and the desire for
intimidation were treatable syndromes rather than ancient evils that have
remained dangerous throughout history.

Human
nature is not so easily transcended, just because a new therapeutic generation
has confused its iPhone apps and Priuses with commensurate moral and ethical advancement.
Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality
was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Deterrence
— which alone prevented wars — was predicated on the shared assumption that
starting a conflict would bring more violence down upon the aggressor than he
could ever inflict on his victim. Once lost, deterrence was restored usually by
disproportionate responses that led to victory over and humiliation of the
aggressive party.

The
wreckage of Berlin trumped anything inflicted by the Luftwaffe on London. The
Japanese killed fewer than 3,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor; the Americans
killed 30 times that number of Japanese in a single March 10, 1945, incendiary
raid on Tokyo. “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” was
the standard philosophy by which aggressive powers were taught never again to
start hostilities. Defeat and humiliation led to peace and reconciliation.

The
tragic but necessary resort to disproportionate force by the attacked not only
taught an aggressor that he could not win the fight he had started, but also
reminded him that his targeted enemy might not be completely sane, and thus
could be capable of any and all retaliation.

Unpredictability
and the fear sown by the unknown also help to restore deterrence, and with it
calm and peace. In contrast, predictable, proportionate responses can reassure
the aggressor that he is in control of the tempo of the war that he in fact
started. And worse still, the doctrine of proportionality suggests that the
victim does not seek victory and resolution, but will do almost anything to
return to the status quo antebellum — which, of course, was disadvantageous and
shaped by the constant threat of unexpected attack by its enemies.

Applying
this to the Middle East, the Palestinians believe that the new American
indifference to the region and Washington’s slapdowns of Netanyahu have
reshuffled relative power. They now hope that there is no deterrent to violence
and that, if it should break out, there will be only a proportionate and modest
response from predictable Westerners.

Under
the related doctrine of moral equivalence, Westerners are either unwilling or
unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent. Instead,
because the world more often divides by 55 to 45 percent rather than 99 to 1
percent certainty, Westerners lack the confidence to make moral judgments —
afraid that too many critics might question their liberal sensitivities, a
charge that in the absence of dearth, hunger, and disease is considered the
worst catastrophe facing an affluent Western elite.

The
question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the
cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also
whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a
democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic,
authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and
the United States in particular — and is currently engaged in clear-cut
aggression.

McCarthy:Palestinian terrorism and Israeli
self-defense are not the same thing.

The
next intifada is on, and the Obama
administration, as one would expect, is on the wrong side.

There
has been a spike in Palestinian terrorism over the past few weeks. One has to
call it a spike because Palestinian terrorism is always thrumming — there’s
never a real stop. About 70 Israelis have recently been mauled, and some
killed, in over two dozen sneak attacks, mostly by stabbing.

The
ultimate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate
Israel’s existence as a Jewish state by a two-track campaign of internal violence and international political pressure. As I’ve previously detailed,
this is the “one-state solution” preferred by Islamists and Leftists. It is
abetted, wittingly or not, by the “two-state solution,” a bipartisan Beltway
obsession that entails pressuring Israel to accommodate next-door neighbors who
will be satisfied with nothing less than burning its house down.

The
proximate cause for the current bloodletting is incitement by Palestinian
political leadership, particularly Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud
Abbas (also known as “Abu Mazen”).

The
ugly reality is that Islamists and the radical pan-Arab Left — those in the
Nasser-Arafat mold — are in competition to prove who is the most anti-Semitic,
a coveted distinction in their culture. Abbas and his Fatah party must compete
with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch, whose charter
explicitly frames the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews as dictates
of Allah. As Caroline Glick perceptively explains, Abbas has more to gain from
the perversely named “peace process,” which keeps the West invested in him,
than from a peace settlement, in which an influx of Hamas sympathizers would
likely drive him from power. Thus, he does his bit to stoke the violence.Over
the past few weeks, he has incited rioting at the Temple Mount in the Old City
of Jerusalem, falsely accusing Jews of defiling and attempting to seize the
site. Among his gems is the admonition that Jews “have no right to desecrate
[the al-Aqsa Mosque and other Temple Mount sites] with their filthy feet.” The
purported secular moderate went on to out-Hamas Hamas, lauding Muslims who
physically attack Jews attempting to tour the area:

Each
drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for
the sake of Allah. Every shahid [i.e., martyr] will be in heaven and every
wounded person will be rewarded by Allah’s will.

For
good measure, Abbas libelously accused Israel of “executing” a 13-year-old
Palestinian boy, Ahmad Mansara, “in cold blood.” In fact, Mansara and his older
brother were caught on video stabbing Jews, including a child riding a bicycle.
When they tried to slice and dice the Israeli police who responded to the crime
scene, Mansara was shot. But he was not “executed in cold blood”; he is alive
and well and recuperating thanks to Israeli doctors and nurses who immediately
gave him medical care.

Abbas’s
diatribe can have had no purpose but to ignite yet another round of attacks —
not a “cycle of violence,” as the State Department describes it, but a
unilateral terror campaign. Indeed, Abbas is merely repeating his performance
of a year ago, when he exhorted Palestinians to prevent Jews “from entering the
holy site in every way possible” — a summons to jihad that was broadcast
repeatedly on Palestinian television and, Ms. Glick recounts, led to a similar
spate of attacks on Israeli civilians.

To
describe as utter nonsense the claim that Israel is trying to seize the Temple
Mount would be an insult to utter nonsense.

Jordan
invaded East Jerusalem in 1948. During the 19 years of Jordanian occupation
that followed, the world did not seem to mind that Palestinians were not given
their own state. Nor did it much notice the enforcement of sharia: thousands of
Jews and Christians driven from their homes, Jews denied access to holy sites,
centuries-old synagogues destroyed, and severe restrictions placed on
Christians — including limits on visits to holy sites and a requirement that
the Koran be taught in Christian schools.

In
1967, against Israel’s warnings, Jordan joined the Six-Day War of aggression
waged by Arab-Islamic states, to disastrous effect for themselves. Their goal
then, like the Islamist-Leftist goal now, was to annihilate the Jewish state —
as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser put it about a week before the war, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” with which, he later added, “we
will not accept any . . . coexistence.” It was the Arab-Islamic states, though,
that were routed. Jordan’s foolish decision to attack West Jerusalem resulted
in its being throttled and pushed out of East Jerusalem by the Israeli Defense
Forces.

The Old
City’s iconic edifices are among the world’s holiest sites for Jews,
Christians, and Muslims. Under Israeli control, the sites have been opened to
tourists of all faiths. Yet, in deference to Islam’s notoriously hair-trigger
sensitivities, Israel placed the Temple Mount under the management of a Muslim
waqf (a Jordanian trust). Furthermore, the Israeli government prohibits Jews
from praying at the Temple Mount, notwithstanding that it is widely regarded as
Judaism’s most sacred site. Even a hint that this status quo may be altered
suffices to trigger Palestinian terror attacks, so Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has repeatedly and emphatically committed to maintaining it.

So what
did the Obama administration do? As the violence raged, a top State Department
spokesman, retired Navy admiral John Kirby, addressed the situation. “Well, certainly,” he claimed (the word is a
verbal tic for this highly uncertain man), “the status quo has not been
observed, which has led to a lot of the violence.”

This
statement was patently untrue and, under the circumstances, recklessly
irresponsible — so much so that Kirby ended up retracting his “certainly”
statement on Twitter, burbling about how he “did not intend to suggest” what he
had so clearly said — and what, as John Hinderaker notes, an Israeli security
official described as the U.S. State Department’s “crazy, deceitful and baseless” comments.

Kirby’s
retraction came only after he had poured more fuel on the fire by rolling out
the moral-equivalence canard that State has honed through 20 years of
blood-soaked “peace process.” Asked if he would assess blame for the violence,
the spokesman responded, “certainly [uh-oh]
individuals on both sides of this divide are — have proven capable of and in
our view are guilty of acts of terror.”

Not
surprisingly, Kirby declined to specify what Israeli “terrorist” attacks he had
in mind. Perhaps he was referring to an apparent revenge attack by an Israeli
who injured four men in stabbings last week — two Palestinians and two Israeli
Bedouins it seems he mistook for Palestinians. Maybe Admiral Kirby preferred
not to elaborate because, at a certain point, disgracefully drawn moral
equivalency embarrasses even the shameless Obama administration. The Israeli
government vigorously condemns and prosecutes criminals who attack civilians.
By contrast, the Palestinian Authority willfully incites terrorism, sings
paeans to terrorists in government-controlled media, and even names streets
after them. In fact, the PA has joined a unity government with Hamas, a
formally designated terrorist organization under American law. It is in the terrorism business.

Well,
if moral equivalence is the order of the day, we should add that Kirby’s boss,
John Kerry, was just as reprehensible as Kirby. In a speech at Harvard
University, our redoubtable secretary of state opined that the Palestinian
rampage was catalyzed by . . . wait for it . . . “a massive increase in
settlements” purportedly built by Israelis over the past two years. This, he
says, threatens — all together now — the “two-state solution.”

Of
course, Israel is not massively increasing settlements; it is constructing
additional housing on existing settlements for growing communities. Moreover,
the fact that the settlements are unrelated to the ongoing violence is open and
notorious: Abbas incited the attacks, he is quite proud of having done so, and he
continues to lionize the attackers.

As far
as settlements are concerned — this is not a result of a massive wave of
settlements because there’s not been a massive wave of settlements. . . . And
second, . . . the facts count. It is the very killers themselves who explain
why they’re doing what they’re doing. They leave behind Facebook pages in which
they cite and repeat Palestinian incitement about the al-Aqsa Mosque. All the
lies that are said about us trying to bring down the mosque or change the
status quo, they cite that as the reason for their activity. And you can’t fit
a false template on reality. . . .

This is
what is driving this current wave. I’m sorry. The old models don’t apply.
There’s a Palestinian attempt to inflame violence based on the false
allegations that we are changing the Temple Mount, now on the false allegations
that we’re executing innocent civilians. It doesn’t wash. And I expect our
friends around the world to look at these facts, recognize them for what they
are and, I think, to condemn these Palestinian attacks and to demand from Abu
Mazen to stop the incitement and to restore calm.

Dream
on, Mr. Prime Minister.

As to
Kerry’s claim that settlement building provoked the violence, it was left to
Kirby to rationalize that the secretary did not really mean what he said — an
occupational hazard for Kerry spokesmen, but one Kirby “certainly” is the
perfect guy to handle. The problem, alas, is that Abbas means exactly what he says:
What Israel’s enemies want is the one-state solution.